A reply to a comment placed by a friend in ‘Evolution – The scientific front’:

“The matter, put simply, is thus: Evolution is a materialist theory, while you are anti-materialist!”

Now, let’s see… in only one sentence, you manage to compact two false statements. What makes me sad is that I suspect that you knew that already!

‘Evolution is a materialist theory,…’.
If you use ‘materialist’ in a Marxist sense, then Evolution is certainly not a materialist theory. Your friends in the USSR knew that. That is why Lysenko was against it and led 20 million people to starvation. And it is not strange that he was against it, since “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness” [K. Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’], when followed literally, leaves no room for hereditary influences on the determination of the “consciousness of men”. You see, evolution is an open ended model that is not compatible with the strict economic determinism and historical inevitability that Marx supported in the social sciences; as Lysenko put it “By getting rid of Mendelism-Morganism-Weismannism from our science we banish chance out of biological science.” [T.D. Lysenko, Aug 7 1948. Appleman 1970:559]
It is true that some leftists in the West played the ‘Evolution card’ to fight the religious Right, and also that there were some Communists that were supporters of Evolution (for example Trotsky, and Marx himself), but this is clearly not enough to support your claim, as I hope I have shown above. Engels himself, by the way, was not that enthusiastic with some of the implications of the Darwinist evolutionary theory: “The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to organic nature of Hobbes’s theory of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois economic theory of competition, as well as the Malthusian theory of population.” [Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 584.]

‘…while you are anti-materialist’
First of all, it is strange to be accused by a Believer (your claim) of being, as you say, anti-materialist. I wonder what Marx would say about that.
I support the position that the ‘historical materialism’ that Marx formulated is a fallacy, but that does not mean that I am an ‘anti-materialist’. I have never made such a claim; what I have said is that I am a realist and a rationalist. It is true that I have some problems with some of the materialist claims, but not in such a degree as to say that I am against materialism in general – I am still struggling with some of these problems.